Instagram ranks fastest growing website in April

Photo-sharing app sees unique visits shoot up 78%

Last month, Instagram launched its Android app, saw its user numbers jump by 10 million in 10 days, pushing it over the 40 million user mark and it was purchased by Facebook. It also saw its website crack the top 10 fastest growing sites in the United States, jumping 19% in a single month.

Pretty impressive growth.

In April, Instagram delivered another stellar performance as its unique visitors shot up 78% to 14.5 million, from 8.2 million unique visitors in March, making it the fastest-growing Web property, according to a comScore report released on Thursday.

Instagram is now ranked No. 106 overall in unique visitors. Last month it was the ninth fastest growing and was ranked nearly 100 sites lower at 204.

Oddly enough, this good news came on the same day that the company that bought Instagram launched its own new camera app, casting some doubt over Instagram’s future. It remains to be seen what, if any, affect Instagram’s astounding growth the last two months has on what Facebook decides to do with it.

The second fastest growing website was MLB.com, up 66% for the month with 16.2 million unique visitors. This growth should not be surprising given that new baseball season started at the beginning of this month.

Behind them were Directv sites, BuzzFeed.com and FullSail.edu, going up 42%, 41% and 31%, respectively.

Top 50 properties

Still, despite this tremendous growth of all of these websites, none of them were able to crack the top 50 properties during the month.

Google sites were on top in April, with 188.9 million unique visitors, followed by Microsoft sites with 171.1 million, Yahoo! sites with 170.8 million, Facebook with 158.6 million and Amazon rounding out the top five with 110.8 million unique visitors.

Tumblr cracked the top 50 properties for the first time in April, hitting number 47 with 23.5 million.

Growth by category

When broken down by category, general news websites saw the largest percentage jump last month, going up 12% to 183.1 million visitors, perhaps due to the heating up of election season.

The top news site in April was Yahoo!-ABC News Network, which had 89.1 million visitors.

After that the drop-off is steep with number two Huffington Post Media Group (HPMG) News coming in with 59.4 million, nearly 30 million less. CNN had 57.4 million, MSNBC had 55.7 million, CBS had 39.3 million and USAToday Sites had 34.1 million visitors.

Oddly absent from this group is FoxNews.com, despite the channel being the highest rated cable news station in the country.

Beauty/Fashion/Style websites grew by 9% in April, up to 83.6 million visitors. Glam Style was the top website in the category, growing by 9% to get 13.2 million unique visitors. Stylelist Sites went up 15% for 9.9 million visitors, while Hearst Beauty & Fashion Network had 5.2 million, while PopSugar Fashion Beauty & Shopping and Total Beauty Media each had 4.7 million visitors.